Apr 25
People of the world unite?!
Written by Nimrod on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Filed under:-mini-posts | Tags:language, music
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Filed under:-mini-posts | Tags:language, music
Add comments
Here is a light topic. Since last year’s parody song “Say a word in heart”, singing songs in a foreign language — if you can call it that – has been raised to a totally new level. You’ve probably even heard the stomach-churning subsequent parodies of “Shanghai beach”, “Spicy girl”, and even the Peking Opera standard “Su san qi jie”, but alas this genre has mercifully run its short course.
On the other hand, there are more serious foreign language translations of songs, too. Just today, I discovered really nice versions of translated national anthems. Most anthems tend to be specific to a national consciousness, metrically prosidic, and so difficult to convey well in a different language context, but these two versions are quite good, I thought! What say you?
Here’s one of the American anthem sung in Chinese by some Youtube expat:
while here is a quite touching rendition of the Chinese anthem “March of the volunteers” translated to English sung by Paul Robeson
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April 25th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Thanks for posting this. Great singing from both of them. And I learned something more about Paul Robeson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Robeson
April 25th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
The last time when I heard Star Spangled Banner was sung that bad was by Roseanne Barr.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrFW2aYHVR8
April 26th, 2009 at 12:48 am
Right, when I say good, I wasn’t referring to the singing… If you go by singing “Say a word in heart” can even be considered professional.